Funnily enough, that's exactly what "obscene" means in popular parlance. On the other hand, the legal standard for what should be considered obscene is so inherently uncertain and varies so much across time and place that it's just meaningless to say anything that purports to be definitive about that.
I realize you're referring to some universal abstract theoretical concept of obscenity that doesn't apply or exist. The one I describe does, and I think that makes it more useful here.
These are not just literary classics, they carry a specific culture forward. People whose values are threatened by that culture need to not engage with them. They do so by finding things to be offended by in the books. In many cases the offence is perfectly genuine. It is caused by cognitive dissonance, and not cynical manipulation.
That doesn't make it less frustrating. But understanding why people have trouble with these works helps build empathy for them. And empathy is necessary to present your points in a way that is persuasive to their views. Yelling in anger at them is easy. Actually changing their minds is far harder. And it does require trying to understand.
Stop defending tyranny.
You as an individual are not required to do this if you don't want to, but if a movement wants to be successful then a degree of empathy with those who are resisting the movement is likely necessary for success.
To have empathy with a view is not condoning it
From my point of view, you don't reason with immature children, you give them a time-out. You don't hand them weapons of mass destruction.
It can also be used on bad faith actors by giving you better avenues of winning over the audience - which is the only real point of continuing a conversation with one.
If you are personally not capable of attempting empathy, that's fair. As I said, it is frustrating and hard. But a political culture where nobody attempts empathy is what has allowed grifters playing up the resulting culture war to gain political power, and put themselves in a position to aim for a dictatorship. If everyone keeps doing the same old, same old, the totalitarian outcome is guaranteed.
I'll make this concrete. Right now, many in Trump's base are dissatisfied with the handling of the Epstein affair. As much as you may disagree with a random Republican, the odds are that your differences are not as important right now than winding up united against the idea of an authoritarian pedophile running the country. But if the only emotion that they get is anger about all of the areas where there is disagreement, they won't have anywhere to go but back to Trump.
Is that outcome really what you think is best?
For now. And, if these would-be book-banners have their way, not for long.
Re-read the comment that you replied to, and find out where I said the same thing.
Most of these would-be book-banners do not actually want to create a totalitarian state. They honestly believe that they live in a democracy that was hijacked in 2020. They are being walked into accepting dictatorship on the principle that you have to fight fire with fire. When you meet them with fire, you're confirming the world-views that make them useful tools for Trump and co.
The actual enemy only has power because useful fools are willing to follow them. Treating those useful fools as enemies is a key part of the dynamic that grants the actual enemy power.
I am advocating learning how to talk with those useful fools, and assist them in finding paths away from being the power base for the actual enemy.
I strongly believe that for many people just doing this is causing them to dig into their heels and instead of examining themselves they are pushed to being on the defensive trying to say they are not racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever. Which is not getting us anywhere and is just making both sides angrier.
There are the extremes, people that have the power that are pushing things like this. But then there are the manipulated. Those that are being told lies and being encouraged to vote a certain why because they simply are only seeing part of the picture. Maybe they don't have exposure to the world. Whatever.
While I do respect someone's right to protect their own mental health and not want to engage in a conversation with many of these people, these conversations do need to happen. I truly believe that the majority of people are nowhere near as vile as those in power right now are. So we need to understand why they are enabling them.
That being said...
It is a very fine line. Too much empathy can lead to them thinking that this is ok, there does need to be some force in a push back against what is happening right now. Pushing back on the misinformation that is causing many people to hold these views.
So yes we can try to understand where these views are coming from without giving them weight as being valid.
People who are trying to harm my friends and family don't deserve any of my time and effort.
My biggest issue is not the lack of contact, it is the demonizing. Using blanket terms like "if you voted for trump your racist, homophobic, sexist, etc" when I just simply don't think that is a valid blanket statement and is really just a "feel good" statement for us to justify not hearing why they might have done something.
I do think that we are actively pushing them to be more extreme with blanket statements like this and it isn't not actually helping.
We can keep calling them names all we want but the fact is they are still voters that are enabling what we all have to deal with. Either we acknowledge that or we just keep repeating the same pattern we have been repeating since at least the 70's. A little bit of progress followed by a regression.
I do grant that it is very hard. Just as it is hard to have a rational conversation with a cult member. But the fact that it is hard doesn't mean that it isn't worth trying.
There is no genuine offense here, they don't even know what the books are about other than someone saying "its LGBT". It is just cynical manipulation and hate.
also stats on book reading are notoriously cooked, look at how many books publishers claim the median American reads.
Trying to give grades to kids for Oscar Wilde's work is fully against the spirit of his thinking. Trying to grade kids for a whole lot of modern "classics" also goes against the spirit of their thinking. Joyce was too busy writing horny smut to be a supporter of literary analysis of his work.
But more seriously, most young adult fiction is pretty low quality. I cringe pretty hard when I look back at what that genre had us reading at the time. Percy Jackson and Eoin Colfer are poster children for the millennial brain rot that ended our collective love of YAF. We are a far cry from the high point it hit under the excellent writing of a certain Brian Jacques
Joyce's penchant for scatology in no way diminishes his canon's suitability for engagement via critical theory. If anything, the poststructuralist interdisciplinary approach is as natural a bedfellow for the interpretation of Ulysses of Finnegan's Wake as one could hope for.
To demean Eoin Colfer is another interesting hill to die on (Darren Shan?). Benny and Omar is a fantastic debut novel and a great introduction to class and cultural distinctions in the Islamic world as viewed through the eyes of a surly western teenager. The Artemis Fowl debut as well is a perfectly inoffensive fresh IP with an interesting take on putting a cyberpunk spin on Irish Mythology - although marred somewhat by an appalling cinematic adaptation.
To then cite Brian Jacques as a high-point, ploughing a furrow as he does in the foothills of mid-brow K-12 readership, only suggests to me somebody completely unfamiliar with the canons of Terry Pratchett or Philip Pullman. In any case, you seem to be conflating Young Adult Fantasy with the rich and well populated canon of Young Adult Fiction.
Properly defining how we educate children is tough.
To put it plainly, this attitude is probably the main reason reading books is sometimes labelled as an elitist poser passtime.
Kids will enjoy reading books that are genuinely good, but they need to care about the subject in the first place and they'll come for more on their own term. Focusing on the numbers ("X books per months") or denigrating the other things they also enjoy solely based on the format will just signal no shit is given about the actual content.
It's possible that the worst of these bans were done in strategic bad faith in partnership with the plaintiffs: to provide standing and legal cause for the plaintiffs to sue.
There may have been bans made that were reasonable but politically one-sided (perhaps an illustrated kamasutra, just to give an example), and the strategy to re-establish them was a sort of reverse motte-and-bailey -- get things that are far more innocent banned in a bid to sue and reverse all bans.
Those with any form of power in very large measure (money, fame, political power, influence) ought not to be trusted implicitly.
This law is about what books are in public libraries. It is a counter to the push by teachers to socialize brown kids into having “brown people” ethnic identity. I’m a brown person with brown kids and I’m also furious at the (mostly white liberal) teachers who want my kids to think of themselves as “brown people.”
I want my kids to be socialized like I was, with an American identity shared with their white neighbors. I hate the idea that my kids would think that they have more in common with another ethnic Bangladeshi in Queens than she does with a random person in Appalachia. It’s a shallow, boring mindset and one that’s antithetical to personal success in American society. And frankly, all the “brown people identity” books for south asians are dreck written by losers who are still upset because some kid made fun of their lunch in elementary school. If my kids want to understand her roots, they can read a book about the Mughal Empire.
And it’s not just Florida. Trump won over 40% of asians and nearly 50% of hispanics last year. There is a larger debate amongst “brown people” themselves about how to socialize our kids and the liberal preference for identity politics is by no means universally accepted.
If you're in a grossly generic way referring to hispanics, african americans, Indian Americans and many distinct and complex others with less-than caucasian skin color, then i'd suggest you look at voting polls. A surprising number of people from these and other groups support conservative causes too. You going to claim they're all deluded idiots who need a progressive to tell them how they should think and vote?
Same for women. Millions of women are republican-leaning, or conservative in some way. It's not so idiotically simple as hur dur, the republs want to dehumanize women. Their politics on women's reproductive rights and other things are shitty in many ways, but they're more complex than your take.
All that said, this list of books proposed for bans is a laughable idiocy from people who really need to get their heads out of their asses. In the massively digitally interconnected 21st century, where nearly any information can be obtained at any time by nearly anyone, trying to ban things like "The Handmaid's Tale" or "The Kiterunner" for obscenity is absurd.
At this point, there is not even a pretention of anything else.
Yes, conservative Latin American men like the male supremacy aspect of it. Them and women too also often like the racism against Asian and blacks part of it.
There has been an organizing current in US politics around the theology and political theory of dominionism -- that a certain set of related religions have a responsibility to take over governmental authority in order to make the law support their particular belief set so that things they view as sinful are not supported, or actively discouraged, by the legal framework.
The people supporting this political wave tend to be extremely triumphalist in their personal religious zeal, unwilling to make compromises, and are iconoclastic and disrespectful to most outside their in-group.
Much like other iconoclasts and zealots, they rely on the pluralistic principle of toleration to force the paradox of tolerance to bend their way.
It's shame - pluralism is much more invigorating and no one forces lifestyles they disagree with onto dominionists.
--------------------
Genesis 16:4 – “And he went in unto Hagar, and she conceived…” (Abram and Hagar)
Genesis 29:23 – “…and he went in unto her.” (Jacob and Leah)
Genesis 30:4 – “…and Jacob went in unto her.” (Jacob and Bilhah)
Ruth 4:13 – “…and he went in unto her, and the LORD gave her conception…” (Boaz and Ruth)
Variants & related euphemisms
Genesis 38:16 – “…he turned unto her by the way, and said, Go to, I pray thee, let me come in unto thee…” (Judah and Tamar)
2 Samuel 11:4 – “And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her…” (David and Bathsheba)
Leviticus 18:6+ – “uncover nakedness” is repeated as a sexual euphemism.
Genesis 38:9 – “…when he went in unto his brother’s wife, that he spilled it on the ground…” (Onan; explicit ejaculation reference).
Having a book available does not mean promoting it or establishing it as a religion.
https://oklahoma.gov/education/newsroom/2025/march/despite-c...
The Constitution only applies if there are people able and willing to enforce it.
This lets people at the top do whatever now since the eventual consequences (if any) are way out in the future and punitive to the gains they get now.
Its like being a bank robber with a Ferrari when the cops are stuck using horse-and-buggies.
My hope is that this situation wakes Americans up to the fact that laws were always this way. I'm hoping this breaks the myth of the law as a fair arbiter of justice. In reality the legal system of the USA is enforced at the whim of incredibly biased cops, judges, and politicians. I really think a day in a county courthouse should be a requirement for all American kids so they can see just how arbitrarily sentencing is applied or how whether someone ends up in trial at all can hinge on whether a judge agrees or disagrees there was probable cause, and the judge will do like 20 of these hearings one after another.
Not to mention the fact that any black American can tell you that there's two justice systems in the USA: the one for white people, and the one for everyone else. Hence why so many black kids can tell you about when their parents gave them "The Talk," and no, it's not the birds and bees one, it's the one about how your white friends can get up to mischief that you can't and there's nothing you can do about it so don't bother getting mad about it, just keep your head down and never backtalk the cops.
This is advice my parents gave me too. It's generally sound advice.
For example, a writer could call a woman a "Jezebel" without any expository context, assuming that the reader would know what that meant.
Thus the bible should be in every high school and higher education library.
But I don't see any reason a library can't have various books from antiquity, for reference at least. Probably multiple editions or translations of each too.
Without the bible, people still have dictionaries if they don't understand words or references. Or they could use Google. I don't see why some books would be "too crucial" not to ban in a law banning books intended to protect kids.
If anything, I find it easier to defend a ban on religious books in (public) schools.
We no longer live in the middle of the 20th century. Based on your bandwagon logic, we should also require the Quran, Torah, Shruti, Smriti, The Book of Mormon and associated volumes, the apocrypha, Watchhouse volumes from JWs, NIV, NRSV-CE, The Good Book [0], Buddhist texts, Holy Piby.
No. We don't need that. This is a misapplication of Chesteron's Fence to the late 18th century US culture. We all survived the 1950s to now and culture has, dramatically and mostly for the better, evolved.
On the other hand, in different areas with different cultural traditions, each of those books should be required reading as they were central to their literary tradition. And, one assumes, are.
To deny that contemporary American culture has its roots in European culture (i.e. western culture) is to deny reality. And honestly, it mystifies me why so many seem to want to be ignorant of their own cultural roots.
And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. – Genesis 19:33–36.
And when she had brought them unto him to eat, he took hold of her, and said unto her, Come lie with me, my sister. And she answered him, Nay, my brother, do not force me; for no such thing ought to be done in Israel: do not thou this folly. And I, whither shall I cause my shame to go? and as for thee, thou shalt be as one of the fools in Israel. Now therefore, I pray thee, speak unto the king; for he will not withhold me from thee. Howbeit he would not hearken unto her voice: but, being stronger than she, forced her, and lay with her. – 2 Samuel 13:11–14
Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished. - Isaiah 13:16.
And when her sister Aholibah saw this, she was more corrupt in her inordinate love than she, and in her whoredoms more than her sister in her whoredoms. She doted upon the Assyrians her neighbours, captains and rulers clothed most gorgeously, horsemen riding upon horses, all of them desirable young men. Then I saw that she was defiled, that they took both one way, And that she increased her whoredoms: for when she saw men pourtrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans pourtrayed with vermilion, Girded with girdles upon their loins, exceeding in dyed attire upon their heads, all of them princes to look to, after the manner of the Babylonians of Chaldea, the land of their nativity: And as soon as she saw them with her eyes, she doted upon them, and sent messengers unto them into Chaldea. And the Babylonians came to her into the bed of love, and they defiled her with their whoredom, and she was polluted with them, and her mind was alienated from them. So she discovered her whoredoms, and discovered her nakedness: then my mind was alienated from her, like as my mind was alienated from her sister. Yet she multiplied her whoredoms, in calling to remembrance the days of her youth, wherein she had played the harlot in the land of Egypt. For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses. Thus thou calledst to remembrance the lewdness of thy youth, in bruising thy teats by the Egyptians for the paps of thy youth. - Ezekiel 23:11-21
But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. – Numbers 31:18
There does not seem to be a clear interpretation of this AFAIK. A lot of the other bits of Genesis have clear messages (e.g. the creation myth, the near sacrifice of Isaac, etc.) but not all necessarily. It might be that there were no other men and they were desperate for children.
“If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.”
Rapin' is ok if she doesn't belong to someone else (theft) and you have $50. Also HIS penalty is that HE has to marry HER.
Also, anytime you are to the point of asking if the words from the bible are 'ok', you've already lost the argument with the person you are talking to. The bible is infallible, so of course it is okay. You cannot use it as evidence against their point. Ever. It is a waste of breath on your part.
Also you have to have a very cartoonish view of people think we're like the Hulk and turn green the moment you come across a copy of Mein Kampf, denazification was a broad cultural project, not a binary thing about one text.
The primary struggle with that book is actually reading it because it's simply horrid. If you wanted to prevent Germans from turning to nationalism you'd probably have taken Thomas Mann's political writings off the shelves.
It should appear evident, and a pretty apolitical stance, but here we are.
Which laws did Democrats pass calling for books to be removed from schools? I admit I'm not always paying attention, but I don't remember any.
There is less and less any reason for them to try to hide their true intentions and can just be more open with their blatant racism, sexism, homophobia, etc etc.
Side note: was quite surprised to see a reference to Cloud Atlas. While not surprised given the entire point of that book, it makes me wonder how much these people are actually reading these books and what that looks like.
Rather than big government via vague laws that allow random people to control everything in schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/us/north-dakota-books-obs...
> HB 1069 required that school librarians remove materials from their collections that contain “sexual content,” regardless of the value of the book
Florida cannot ban private libraries from stocking books with sexual content. But librarians are government employees buying books and maintaining libraries with government money. The state can direct its employees what kinds of books to make available for the same reason any private entity can do so.
This might be different if libraries were neutral venues for authors to come present about their books. In that case you might have a case about viewpoint discrimination. But the first amendment can’t force the government to buy particular books and make them available to the public.
However, it is pretty funny how parents not wanting their minor children exposed to sexually explicit material when they send them to public schools gets reduced by the left to
> HECKIN' BOOK BAN! CENSORSHIP!
They're not even worried that their zeal to expose children to material parents deem illicit might be construed as a form of "grooming."
I also wonder how many of the leftists crying censorship supported efforts to deplatform the KarenFarms or other legal websites because of wrongthink.
... So, that would be approximately every great work of literature, every important religious text... I mean, what does this leave? This seems _incredibly_ broad; even when censorship of books for obscenity was routine, there was pretty much always a getout for "yeah, but it's Proper Serious Literature".
Like, what books are on the curriculum for English students in Florida? Just the Very Hungry Caterpillar?
> It also allowed parents or county residents to raise objections to material, which then would need to be removed within five days of the objection and remain unavailable until the book was formally reviewed.
Again, wtf? Surely this would allow anyone sufficiently motivated to just run a DOS attack.
On one hand we want kids to learn about consent, what 'normal sex' is like and all that, but simultaneously there is this idiotic push to prevent them from encountering any of it until they are 18. If we don't want kids to see bad porn, we need to ensure that there is lots of good porn available, and not just some boring sex ed bullshit. I mean actual benign everyday sex that kids can safely watch and learn from because otherwise they will never see it anywhere else (it's not like they regularly watch their parents or other people do it).
You have to be incredibly regressive to think 18 is somehow a good cutoff for this.
epistasis•1h ago
The people who fight for free speech in these cases, devoting time and money to it, and have real meaningful effect, self-describe in more ordinary ways.
mlinhares•1h ago
gosub100•1h ago
epistasis•1h ago
In what way do you consider this similar to laws enforced by courts and police and the full legal system?
DrillShopper•51m ago
They are fighting to get different books (less Eurocentric, for the most part) into the curriculum, but they're not removing them from the library.
prox•1h ago
steveBK123•1h ago
NickC25•1h ago
mindslight•52m ago
Breonna Taylor being summarily executed by government agents for Kenneth Walker exercising his natural right to night time home defense. This is the exact scenario the 2A enthusiasts always grandstand about - "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away", "From my cold, dead hands", etc. Any yet the response from the sheer majority of supposed 2A enthusiasts? Utter fucking silence, if not outright support for the jackboots.
epistasis•26m ago
antonymoose•56m ago
The government deciding standards for content it purchase is neither tyranny nor fascism. You are free to purchase as much controversial or sexually explicit material as you see fit.
amanaplanacanal•22m ago
poplarsol•1h ago
epistasis•1h ago
They are also available in schools, because the judge here enforced the US constitution.
The article is about Florida politicians trying to censor books in public schools, literal government censorship.
bigfishrunning•1h ago
As a "Free Speech Absolutionist", I think as much material as possible should be in public libraries, including material that some people object to. I also think that school libraries should be curated to what is appropriate for the audience. The rub here is defining what is "appropriate". Silencing minority literature is bad. Also allowing my elementary school kids to check out "the turner diaries" is bad. There needs to be a balance.
fknorangesite•1h ago
Any other claims are bad-faith "won't somebody please think of the children" nonsense.
Project 2025 defines all transgender content as inherently pornographic. These censors are not being subtle about their true aims.
bigfishrunning•1h ago
UncleMeat•1h ago
alistairSH•1h ago
epistasis•1h ago
bigfishrunning•1h ago
You can say whatever you want, that doesn't make it a good idea to stock a school with it.
epistasis•1h ago
What does "absolutist" mean to you if you think that limits to what's in a library are a "good idea"?
Remember, I'm not talking about whether there should be limits or not, I'm asking about your self-description of "absolutist" and why absolutism still has fuzzy definitions of what is allowed or not.
bigfishrunning•59m ago
epistasis•42m ago
Again: how is your belief in this compatible with being an "absolutist"?
I don't know how I can phrase this more clearly, yet you repeatedly doge the question.
bigfishrunning•24m ago
ModernMech•10m ago
Let me try to break the deadlock: epistasis is getting at the fact that you can't call yourself an "absolutist" on free speech because your position is not absolute, but qualified -- all speech is free except speech you find problematic, which shall be regulated. Which is pretty much everyone's definition of free speech.
An absolutist would say there should be absolutely no restrictions on what is in the library regardless of the ages of the patrons. They might justify that by saying "free speech is so important we can't place any limits on it. If you as a parent find the idea your child might access speech you find distasteful, it's up to you to prevent your child from seeing it, not the library or the government".
> without fear of repercussion
Let's say you write a book about being a kid and finding it uncomfortable to grow up who you are. You're free to write it, free to talk about it, free to to sell it. But then the government adds your book to a list of books they deem "pedophilic and a danger to children."
Do you think you would be free from repercussions from the government publishing your book on the harmful to kids list? Can free speech thrive in such an environment?
komali2•53m ago
wnoise•48m ago
A 7-year-old doesn't need to read about nearly any topic. Excluding any mention of all of those subjects from the school library leaves a nearly empty library.
For that heavy-handed of a response to be _legally mandated_ requires not just "no need", but some strong evidence of harm. Mentions of sex, oral or otherwise, doesn't actually have much evidence of harm. Certain treatments of it might -- but that's not what the law targets, nor can effectively target. It covers mere mentions or small bits of explicit language, even where that is necessary for the effect of the book. These can and do make parents profoundly uncomfortable, though, and that is worth taking into consideration.
I would think that the usual approach of professional librarians curating based on their own judgement, subject to some oversight from the local school boards to take into account these valid discomforts, but largely baseless fears would be a far better approach.
Levitz•1h ago
Say someone in the police department takes the public stance, as a police officer, that black people are subhuman degenerates, is any pushback from the government a first amendment issue? Note this is an ideological stance and doesn't involve any of their duties.
EDIT: I should have done better than to comment this without the very relevant input from the article. Better late than never I guess:
>A second key component of this ruling is on whether or not regulating books in school libraries constituted “government speech.” Officials for the state argued that they were empowered to make decisions about the materials in those collections because it constituted “government speech” and thus, was not subject to the First Amendment.
>Judge Mendoza disagreed.
>“*A blanket content-based prohibition on materials, rather than one based on individualized curation, hardly expresses any intentional government message at all.* Slapping the label of government speech on book removals only serves to stifle the disfavored viewpoints,” he wrote. While parents have the right to object to “direct the upbringing and education of children,” the government cannot then “repackage their speech and pass it off as its own.”
Emphasis mine. This is frankly even weirder to me. If the government made a blanket, content-based prohibition of any material with a black character, that wouldn't express any intentional government message at all? Really?
epistasis•1h ago
poplarsol•56m ago
epistasis•44m ago
A law of the sort that was struck down is clearly an unconstitutional restriction on speech.
lesuorac•1h ago
Also, "removing" books means the money was already spent. So it's just about whether we should waste money or not by tossing items in good condition.
bigfishrunning•1h ago
epistasis•1h ago
Cerium•1h ago
morkalork•1h ago
n4r9•1h ago
Come on, now.
Levitz•1h ago
n4r9•16m ago
perihelions•1h ago
tremon•1h ago
root_axis•1h ago
xnx•1h ago
gosub100•1h ago
2OEH8eoCRo0•1h ago
steveBK123•56m ago
Is driving 100mph down the highway OK as long as you slow down right before the known speed trap? The system worked?
whimsicalism•1h ago
Sprocklem•7m ago
I do, however, think it is also worth noting that there is value in critically discussing the ideologies espoused by "The Bell Curve" and "Mein Kampf", since both ideologies persist and continue to have influence on American politics today.
komali2•1h ago
Even the word "libertarian" doesn't mean "anarchist" in America as it does everywhere else, to refer to the most far-left you take take political ideology. Instead it refers to a deeply right-wing ideology obsessed with corporatocracy.
terminalshort•57m ago
komali2•34m ago
Libertarianism is an application of right-wing ideology subtracting the State. Opposition to the State may be a shared aspect of the ideologies, but for another example, just because Nazism advocated for nationalizing industries doesn't mean it has anything beyond that in common with Marxist Leninist Communism which advocates for the same.
terminalshort•25m ago
Yes, that's the philosophy. All the rest of what you said is just listing different predictions of what will happen after you get rid of the state. Once you get rid of the state, there is no authority to enforce the "mutual aid or communism" so that isn't a political philosophy. It's just a prediction of what will people will do under their own free will in the absence of a compelling authority.
jltsiren•1m ago
graemep•45m ago
In the UK and I understand libertarianism to mean an extreme free market position, usually in the belief that markets will fix problems unregulated. I think the UK definition is less extreme than the US one but on similar lines.
amanaplanacanal•16m ago
terminalshort•1h ago
It seems to me that the government is allowed to decide what books to buy and stock in its own libraries. I don't understand how freedom of speech obligates the government to make a book available for free. It seems to me like compelled speech to require the government to stock certain books. As this pertains to schools, I don't understand how the government doesn't have the same right to control the curriculum as it does in any other case. e.g. it is not a violation of a teacher's right to free speech to order them not to teach flat earth theory in public schools because that teacher is an employee and not on their own time. Same as my employer can restrict my speech while on the job without violating my rights.
epistasis•47m ago
Similarly, you are also wrong about this compelling the government to stock certain books, that's not on the table at all.
terminalshort•40m ago
You are dancing around the fact that someone has to decide what books go in the library. Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question, which in this case is the state whose budget and laws are controlled by the legislature.
nozzlegear•36m ago
It's the school librarian, who purchases books from their vendor lists. Depending on the school, the school board might vote to put a selection policy in place for the librarian. A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
terminalshort•29m ago
> A few states publish a recommended or approved list of books that the librarian chooses from.
Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
dfxm12•19m ago
Well isn't that exactly what FL did?
No.
terminalshort•9m ago
if (allowed_books.contains(book) { library.add(book) }
It's the same
ModernMech•23m ago
What's being done here is a top-down effort by certain political forces to insert themselves into this community-lead governance. They don't want the community to set local standards; they would rather those standards be dictated by the governor, or by some party-approved commission appointed by him.
> Who should that person be? Seems to me that it should be the owner of the library in question
Agreed, but Republicans think this person should be the governor of the state, and Democrats think this person should be someone local from the community. Ironically, it's Republicans who are styled as the party of small government.
terminalshort•14m ago
nozzlegear•40m ago
The concern here is that letting the government decide which books are kosher for its school libraries and which books aren't kosher is that taken to its extreme, the government could ban all books that aren't the King James Bible without explicitly adopting a pro-King James Bible policy. And if that's the only kind of book they stock in the library, then children who want to check out books are going to be reading literature with a certain kind of slant to it.
Replace the King James Bible with whatever you personally wouldn't want kids to be reading, e.g. the Quran or the Kama Sutra.
terminalshort•20m ago
But there isn't any other choice except to not have school libraries at all. The library is owned by the government and the books are paid for by government funds. Somebody has to decide what goes in the library and what doesn't. Who would that be other than the government?
SoftTalker•18m ago
My high school library didn't offer much popular paperback fiction, but I could have found that at the county public library, or at any bookstore or most general retail stores.
School libraries have limited space, funds, and are constantly making decisions about what is age-appropriate and of educational value.
benmmurphy•17m ago
slibhb•40m ago
An example of this is FIRE -- which was massively criticized by progressives for suing colleges over anti-conservative speech codes, DEI statements, etc. But FIRE has behavred in a princicpled manner and has sued conservatives and the Trump administration over civil liberties violations.
kstrauser•19m ago
I genuinely laughed out loud here. As a Mastodon operator, when I see another new instance describe itself as “free speech absolutists”, it means they’re about to fill up with 2 things: Nazis (as in, literally swastikas and “Jews are oppressing me!” memes) and drawings of Japanese 8 year olds in lingerie.
Every. Single. Time.
QuadmasterXLII•3m ago
Oh and musk of course but I think that's ketamine poisoning, not long-planned betrayal.
ModernMech•30m ago
SilverElfin•3m ago
Let’s not pretend the default situation is uncensored. Librarians are mostly politically skewed to the left, as is their organization (ALA). Walk into libraries in most cities and you’ll find books on the main shelves pushing political ideas from one side, associated with movements like DEI, BLM, LGBTQ, etc. But you won’t find the other side on those shelves.
And that’s the issue. Public money is being used by activist librarians, who practice “critical librarianship”, to basically censor the other side. Changes to public libraries are intended to correct that bias.